1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image processing device and method for correcting motion blur in a video signal, and to an image display device.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventional CRT displays are rapidly being replaced by thinner devices such as liquid crystal display devices and plasma display devices. When liquid crystal displays were first developed, their marked inferiority to CRTs in displaying motion was regarded as a particular problem. In addition to the slow response speed of the liquid crystal, the motion blur due to the holding of each frame image on the screen for an entire frame period was a major factor.
Through improvements in liquid crystal materials, the development of the overdrive technique, and other recent advances in technology, great progress has been made in overcoming the problem of the slow response of liquid crystals. Methods of dealing with the holding issue have also been proposed, such as displaying black images between frames and interpolating subframes between frames. With progressive improvement in the motion display performance of thin display devices, there has come a growing desire to deal with motion blur present in the video signal received by the display device.
The video signal received by a display device has been obtained by integrating the image received by a camera from the subject during the frame period (for example, 1/60 second), quantizing the resulting value of each pixel, and transmitting the pixel values in a standard sequence. If there is relative motion between the subject and the light-receiving device in the camera, the outline of the subject will be blurred to a degree determined by the frame integration time and the speed of the relative motion. This type of blur is referred to below as motion blur.
In Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2002-16820, Nishizawa proposes a deblurring method that uses a scaling circuit to control the scale of the time axis of the video signal so that the time axis becomes shorter in positions where the video signal changes greatly than in positions where the changes are more gradual. This method sharpens the rising and falling edges of image outlines by use of filtering techniques, without adding overshoot or undershoot, and is expected to be effective for isotropic blur of the type caused by poor focusing, when the blur is of narrow width. Motion blur, however, differs from focusing blur in that the amount of blur can vary greatly, depending on the relative motion between the camera and subject, and the blur is not isotropic; it occurs only in the direction of the camera-subject velocity vector. This deblurring method is not readily applicable to motion blur.
In Japanese patent No. 3251127, Dorricott et al. disclose a method that depends on deconvolution of the blur function, using motion vectors. This method fits a mathematical model to the image and carries out a filtering process with the inverse function of the blur function included in the mathematical model.
Regardless of whether the deconvolution is executed in the spatial domain or the frequency domain, however, the quality of the modified image is degraded because the video signals at the upper, lower, left, and right edges of the image differ greatly from the mathematical model. There is also considerable difference between the blur function obtained from the motion vectors and the blur function of the actual motion, and this error further degrades the quality of the modified image.
The motion blur included in a video signal differs from the isotropic blur due to focusing error etc. in that the blur length may be large or small, and the blur direction is not isotropic. For these reasons, filtering methods that apply uniform frequency conversion to the whole image do not always produce desirable results.
If the filter is optimized to correct motion blur with a long blur length, images with slowly changing luminance contours, such as lamp images and the like, will be filtered to correct nonexistent blur, and the displayed image or picture will include artifacts that should not be present.
The present invention addresses these problems with the object of detecting and reducing motion blur in a video signal without degrading displayed picture quality.